Millennium Man
By Jai Narain Sharma

IT seems that a part of all the great spirits of the past might have found a place within the soul of Mahatma Gandhi. So bright and luminous a spirit has rarely cleansed civilisation. The Mahatma’s life-work and position in world history were memorably summed up by Albert Einstein, the greatest scientist of the century, in the following words: "The veneration in which Gandhi has been held throughout the world rests on the recognition, for the most part unconscious, that in our age of moral decay he was the only statesman who represented that higher conception of human relations in the political sphere to which we must aspire with all our powers. We must learn the difficult lesson that the future of mankind will only be tolerable when our course in world affairs, as in all other matters, is based upon justice and law rather than the threat of naked power. Generation to come will scarce believe that such a one as this ever in flesh and blood walked upon this earth."

Gandhi gave a decisive new direction to history. What was it about this man which held the human race in thrall? Who was this individual? And how did he come to yield such influence over the rest of mankind? He himself said that he was a very average individual. He confessed that he was not intellectually brilliant, but he added that while there are limitations to the development of mind there are no limitations to the development of heart.

But Gandhi has also been dubbed by a large number of persons as a reactionary. The more generous of his critics have described him as a revivalist. Some call him irrelevant, specially in the present scenario. Even a mature mind like V.S. Naipaul in his classic work India: A wounded civilisation, opined, "No government can survive on Gandhian fantasy; and the spirituality, the solace of a conquered people, which Gandhi turned into a form of national assertion, has soured more obviously into the nihilism that it always was."

Sometimes a comparison is made between Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru. The latter was modern and the former a revivalist. But it is dangerous to classify important personalities in this way, one may well ask, "Were the Buddha, Mahavira and Christ modern?" They are modern as long as their life and teachings have meaning and significance for humanity. Nehru’s mould of thought was western. Gandhi’s thought was predominantly Indian, in spite of many influences from the West.

If we are to understand Gandhi’s thought in its proper perspective, we must assign to the word ‘modern’ its proper content. Often the word is used in a double sense. In India it is used for person whose external life is patterned after the fashions prevalent among the upper and middle classes in the West missing their finer nuances. This is one variety of the moderns. The other is of those whose outlook on life is scientific and rational.

Let us see if Gandhi was scientific in his approach to the tasks he had in view. He wanted to provide work for the half-starved and half-naked millions, unemployed and underemployed, living in lakhs of villages in India. This, he thought, could be done through the revival of the spinning-wheel and other cottages and village industries. Viewed uncritically in an age of highly sophisticated technology, this looks like ‘reaction’, or ‘revivalism’. The putting back of the clock of progress or whatever else the so-called modernist may choose to call it.

Before the invention of steam and its application to industry, the production of cotton and woollen yarn was a necessity both in the East and the West. The reintroduction of Khadi and other crafts in this age was necessity — not a physical necessity but a moral, social economic and political necessity, if unmitigated poverty resulting from unemployment and semi-employment was to be relieved. Here also Gandhi took the help of science. He offered a prize of Rs 1 lakh to a scientist or technologist who invented a charkha which could yield more yarn and which could be produced and repaired in the villages. What Gandhi objected to was a mad craze for industrialisation which replaces human beings.

Gandhi is also dubbed as conservative on account of his approach to religion. No doubt, he believed in God whose existence he admitted. He could not, however, logically prove it. For him truth was God. The moral law was God. He held that whoever believed in truth and non-violence was spiritual and godly. This, he held, could not be practised in a cave or on a mountain-top. It must manifest itself in every activity of man in society.

But does belief in God militate against rationality and science? All great scientists are not non-believers. They hold that science has little to do with the primordial cause or the causeless cause. As a matter of fact, scientists today have discarded the very idea of cause. They only investigate and find out the process by which change is brought about. Great and famous scientists like Newton, Einstein, J.C. Bose and many others are for belief in God. Only they did not take God inside their laboratories. And their search was for ‘truth’ which, according to Gandhi, is God.

It was not a personal God that the Mahatma believed in. He had the very, very deep and profound Hindu concept of Brahma. The all-pervading reality, which is God in its various manifestations. To quote his own words, "To me God is Truth and love: God is ethics and morality: God is fearlessness: God is the source of life; Light and Life, and yet he is above and beyond all this. He is even the atheism of the atheist: he transcends speech and reason."

Ralph Waldo Emerson, who was well-versed in Indian culture, has written a poem called Brahma where this very idea is memorably expressed: "God is the doubter and doubt and God is the atheist and his atheism". In other words, there is no escape from Him.

Gandhi said, "Scriptures cannot transcend reason and truth; they are intended to purify reason and illuminate the truth." He tried to synthesise the essentials of all religions:"Indeed religion should pervade every one of our actions. Here religion does not mean sectarianism. It means a belief in ordered moral government of the universe. It is not less real because it is unseen. This religion transcends Hinduism, Islam, Sikhism and Christianity, etc. It does not supersede them. It harmonises them and give them reality."

J.B. Kripalani has very rightly said that if such adherence to truth and supremacy of the moral law is modern, Gandhi was modern. If keeping one’s word and fulfilling one’s engagement; eating for the sake of not satisfying a sophisticated palate but to keep one’s body fit for work, recognition of the dignity of physical labour; tolerance and good understanding; feeling at home with those who differ from one or who are opponents; identification with the lowly and lost; untiring work for the poor, needy and downtrodden, the unfortunate Daridranarayana, last, but not least, dying for noble cause is modern, Gandhi was definitely modern.

If, however, the adoption of western forms in dress, food etc, drinking and smoking, dining in fashionable and costly hotels and restaurants; using pleasure-houses and night clubs; using time in scandal and gossip is modern, surely Gandhi was not modern.

The fact is that every son of a father is more modern than his parent. Likewise, every scientist or technologist working in recent times is more modern than the old masters. The word modern without its content is merely a time judgement. It is not quality or value judgement. Modernity is like a fashion which is fleeting and transitory. The latest fashion is for the hour. Modernity, like fashion, may pass even while we are writing or talking about it. Individuals and nations must order their lives by ideas and ideals which are more stable and permanent.

The Mahatma dealt with problems which are timeless and universal because they spring from enduring weaknesses of human nature and human society. Since the solutions he found for them were based on eternal varieties, his influence and relevance are also timeless and universal.